Comfort Inn San Miguel

Highest village in the country with amazing views from pretty well anywhere - don't bother with the 100 steps! There is a really pretty vivero &amp; restaurant with great views.<br><br>A little cooler for that, so nice not to need the fan. In the clouds for part of the day &amp; spectacular thunderstorm at night on the tin roof so didn't get the much needed sleep - early bus to catch &amp; coffee injection needed first!

... Needless to say, they didn&#8217;t know what to do so they just let us go. I laughed for a good five minutes over that one!<br><br>We passed through two more checkpoints with decent cops. All of them <br>just asking where we were going and checking our paperwork. They all <br>asked if we were going to Costa Rica. It&#8217;s as if they forgot (or <br>didn&#8217;t know) that Nicaragua was on their Southern boarder...<br><br>The last checkpoint was the ...

... coffee and watching what I remember was a really important football game (something like the premier champion´s league something-something... Manchester and Chelsea, I think). Good memories in Berlin. Alegria was okay. Beautiful town way up in the mountains, but kind of unremarkable besides that. Definitely the coolest part was taking a walk up to a lagoon on the mountain; not the lagoon itself, but the quiet, stunning walk through coffee fields on ...

Blistering heat, dusty streets with a drunk on every corner is what welcomed us on our arrival in San Miguel. This was just a stop off town on our way to the Honduras border. Although we were only planning to spend a short time here we still wanted to try and make the most of it and see what was on offer, besides being accosted by the drunks who were full to their ears after a long weekend on ...

... how clean Nicaragua is till I saw the garbage strewn verges of Honduras and El Salvador. It looks like they clear the rubbish by periodically setting fire to the side of the road. Let's hope I'm more impressed with the other bits of Honduras I'll see in a couple of days, specially the Bay Islands. There's this thing called CAFTA which means I don ...

... only a few kilometres from the Honduras border before sundown. This was fine since there was absolutely nothing to see nor do in the tiny town so went to bed as early as I did when camping in the jungle. The next morning, my bus mishaps continued for the bus that day decided to leave three hours later than usual so I had no other choice than to hitch a ride to where I needed to go. After receiving a hospitable ride in the back of a ...

... We stopped along the roadside to talk to a farmer who was drying his Maize on the road. He was a very nice man full of smiles and happy. We entered Zacatecoluca and saw a brand new KLR for sale. We stopped to talk to the salesman for a minute. Tried to buy some chain lube and ended up being there almost an hour. As we approached San Miguel the vegetation changed again from farm land to lush ...

... English he said a little. There was a very pleasant truck driver who was 5 people in line ahead of me, he knew exactly what I needed. He pulled me in line ahead of himself . He talked to the immigracion official behind the barred window. The teenager told me what I needed to do. Amazing after 1 1/2 hours of waiting in line it took me less than 3 seconds to get action. The officer went outside and confirmed the vin number. He looked ...

... a bit wrong to write about it on here, so we can tell you about it when we get home if you are interested. Sunday we crossed the border into Honduras and then again into Nicaragua in the comfort of Ticabus. Air con, films, comfort, lovely. The day was a stroll untill a little before we were getting chucked the bus did we realise that we´d lost our guidebook. It is much easier to talk about this incident now, we have had time to recover but at the time it was hugely traumatic ...

... story. The next day, I climbed 2km uphill (the guidebook said downhill..I think they meant on the way back) to the Laguna de Alegría, the Happiness Lagoon. I am so glad I made the climb. Along the way, the scent of a peeled orange filled the air, along with flowers, and of course, a little exhaust from the slightly-more-lazy souls who ascended in their cars. The Lagoon is like a little piece of emerald or ...